The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine Translated by Alyson Waters review by Helen Han Wei Luo

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine

Translated by Alyson Waters

 Review by Helen Han Wei Luo

Publisher: Archipelago Books

Publication date: March 17th, 2026 

ISBN: 9781962770552

Pages: 245

Our Silly, Singular, and Schizophrenic Resistance 

A Review by Helen Han Wei Luo

Will we see signs from above when the time for change finally comes? For thirty years, Breton has been spying through telepathic glasses from the window of his psychiatric compound, observing the precipitous ‘rebirths’ of guerilla fighters known as the Monroe girls. These Amazonian minions tumble from the sky dropping f-bombs and other ammunition, then bolt around the Soviet-esque city for an enigmatic revolutionary cause. Their leader is the deceased dissident Monroe, an executed Party official now orchestrating this radical resistance via radio signal from the afterlife. Our poor schizophrenic observer Breton, however, has no mind for politics. He is being tortured for what he knows about these girls, and will give up nothing because he loves one of them, the one named Rebecca Rausch. For her sake, Breton must find the stomach to return to the outside, and follow her through dark alleyways with dog-like loyalty, pissing everywhere, smelling everything.

In this unpredictable, post-apocalyptic adventure from Antoine Volodine, the latest to be translated into English, the only certainty in the world is our oppression, and perhaps, also the rain. This is why the arrival of the Monroe girls, all sincere acolytes to an unclear ideological program, seems initially like a heaven-sent deliverance. These are the end of days, and the optimism for Monroe’s reforms is real, perhaps not even misplaced – despite the Party’s omnipresence, it is far from a unified goliath. Rather, it is an infinitely fractured and self-cannibalizing authoritarian regime, already containing 343 factions in its former glory days. These factions are listed in their entirety in Part VII, featuring wide-eyed innocents like “the Marxists of Great Compassion”, mild cynics like “The Disappointed by Polpotism”, cheeky contrarians like “the Virgins-with-Child” and possibly free-spirited indie bands like “the Lesbians without Borders”. But don’t let this vast, pseudo-political diversity fool you. The actual dimensions of the Party’s power are about as large as an M. C. Escher sketch, because there is almost nobody left in the world, even counting both the living and the dead. The infighting between these factions is blatantly nonsensical because there is literally nothing to fight over – it’s a stark reminder of the permanence and meaninglessness of the struggle for political domination. 

Yet the few stragglers in this absurdist circus must nevertheless spend their lives entirely within the Party’s raised and tightly clenched fist. Other than Breton and the acrobatic insurgents, the cast of characters also includes Detective Kaytel, a hunger-artist thin official who “resembled nothing” and fat lady Dame Patmos, his former lover and a current Party chief, a “sort of communist elephant seal endowed with the face of a beautiful woman”. The strange, voracious eroticism between Kaytel and Patmos feels like the carcinogenic outcome of a nuclear blast – where desire itself has been warped into something extra-human, a new wild thing being domesticated. 

Arguably, the novel’s most innovative literary maneuver is in the balancing act of Breton’s fractured psyche, portrayed through a first person “I” narrator that is apparently identical to Breton, yet also interacts with him as two distinguishable physical bodies and mental patterns. Even when the two voices fuse into a singular ‘we’, they immediately split again like cells undergoing constant mitosis. But it is always Breton, rather than the “I”, who suffers the biological decay caused by their prolonged incarceration. His vulnerability offers the text’s primary source of pathos and pity:

 “Over the years, Breton had sagged and, whereas in his youth he’d had the appearance of an athlete and even the muscular abilities that go with it, now he could pass unnoticed amid a group of seventy-year-olds being led to the slaughterhouse. He turned his jaundiced, withered face toward me, his physiognomy of a mummy. He was standing near the door but had not yet reached for the doorknob. I raised my eyebrows and asked him silently what he intended to do.” 

This metaphysical conjuring trick and others like it are accomplished by means of Volodine’s and translator Alyson Waters’ dreamy yet precise prose. “Antoine Volodine” is the best-known heteronym used by the prolific and ineffable contemporary French author who also publishes as Lutz Bassman and Manuela Draeger. A writer who sometimes refers to himself in the plural ‘we’, Volodine’s many dozens of other works include Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven (1998), Minor Angels (1999) and Bardo or Not Bardo (2004). While his late-modernist corpus seems generally written from an unclassifiable view from elsewhere, we can find spider silk threads connecting these dreamscapes to our own reality, especially in Soviet prisons, failed revolutions, the afterlife according to Tibetan monks, wastelands and wars, and ludicrously bad weather.   

As for the translation of The Monroe Girls, Waters’ contribution for the English audience has been to intensify the original prose with brief and humane bursts of whimsy, such as when the lightbulb gives off “a timid oatmeal-colored light”, or when clothes are thrown “higgledy-piggledy on the bed”. These tasteful interventions seamlessly extend Volodine’s own instincts to toss little bright clown noses into the background of his gritty film noir.

Beyond the linguistic jaunt, The Monroe Girls stands out as melancholy satire of power. About halfway through the book, we are introduced to two characters sitting aimlessly on a stairwell, a snapshot evocative of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, or maybe one of Hell’s other locked rooms from Sartre’s No Exit. This old couple, a man and woman perhaps four or five days deceased, are embroiled in conversations about the future of the Party and its potential collapse. Contra her skeptical interlocutor, the woman proudly presents this thesis: “Course it hasn’t collapsed […] It’ll last till the bitter end. We’ll all be dead and buried to a man and the Party will still be there.” If this is true, however, then why is so much of the story is spent in anticipation of the return of Monroe, the heroic revolutionary who will supposedly come to the Party’s rescue? Yet the perspicacity of the dead woman’s observation constitutes the novel’s darkest paradox – the Party will both outlive everyone and is still somehow in constant need of saving. It has no real sovereign supremacy, only a sheer and chaotic Foucauldian force that is everywhere and pervades everything. This awful, agentless authoritarian power is like the “translucent immensity” of the rain, which turns out to contain just enough brute strength to drown us, and enough cruelty to never leave us for dead. 

Jean Desvignes (born 1950) is a French writer best known under the pen name Antoine Volodine, as well as Elli Kronauer, Manuela Draeger, Lutz Bassmann and Infernus Iohannes. One of France’s most visionary contemporary writers, his works have won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire, the Prix du Livre Inter, the Prix Wepler, and the Prix Médicis. 

Alyson Waters is a prize-winning translator of French and francophone literary fiction, art history, philosophy, and children’s books. She has translated works by Albert Cossery, Louis Aragon, René Belletto, Jean Giono, Eric Chevillard, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Emmanuel Bove, Claude Ponti, and many others. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a PEN Translation Fund grant, and was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize twice. She taught literary translation at Yale for three decades and currently teaches at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn.

Helen Han Wei Luo is a writer based in NYC and a Philosophy PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her prose has been awarded or finalisted by CBC Literary Prizes, Plentitudes Short Story Prize, Yolk Montreal Prize, PEN Canada New Voices Award, Southeast Review Contest, and Witness Fiction Awards, and her poetry was included in the 2023 Best of Canadian Poetry anthology.

16 September 2026